Arrecife artificial

No mooring line dictates the route here. Four families of concrete modules sit scattered across open sand at 21 to 24 metres: blocks in one cluster, cubes in another, hollow tube sections further along. Divers pick their own path between them. Grunts hang in dense shoals around the structures, thick enough in places to slow the swim through. Barracuda cruise the gaps in open water, working the sand corridors between modules rather than sheltering inside them. Garden eels stand along the cleaner stretches of sand, retreating into their burrows well before a diver gets close.

Current is a fixture on this site, not an exception, and at 21-24m it adds real effort to the swim between modules. Visibility around 15 metres keeps the geometric shapes recognisable at a distance, which is part of why photographers rate this dive over a plain sand crossing. Octopus and moray eels turn up around the structure edges, and rays pass low over the sand between clusters.

This is not a reef shaped by geology. It's a grid of poured concrete, built with a purpose, and that engineered origin sets it apart from the volcanic platform at Pasito Blanco or the lava-stream reef at Arguineguín a short boat ride away. Four separate module designs were placed here deliberately to encourage different species to settle, and three decades on the concrete reads more like colonised rock than raw construction material.

At 21-24m it's also the deepest and most current-exposed site of the south-coast cluster, which is why several operators pitch it as the next step after the shallower Pasito Blanco reef. Divers who want a dive that feels engineered rather than natural come here specifically for that contrast, and the payoff is a site that photographs differently from anything else nearby.

Multiple independent accounts, spanning dive-centre pages and academic-adjacent sources, converge on the same story: the reef was built in 1991 by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, with funding from the regional government, as a study biotope meant to shelter species under pressure from overfishing. The research project reportedly ran until 1994.

No single original document from the university or the government has surfaced to confirm the details directly, so treat the story as well-corroborated rather than officially verified. Either way, the four-module layout on the seabed today matches a site built for a scientific purpose rather than one shaped by tides or lava flow. It is the only site in this stretch of coast with that kind of documented origin.

Current runs through this site often enough that it's worth planning for, not just tolerating. The 21-24m depth sits past Open Water limits, so Advanced Open Water is the practical entry point regardless of what some marketing pages promise about "all levels." Standard Canary Islands kit applies: a dive computer, cutting device, surface marker buoy and sound signal are all required by law, not just good practice.

If you shoot photos, the module-and-sand contrast rewards patience more than fast fin kicks. Give your eyes time to pick barracuda out of open water and garden eels out of the sand before they retreat.